Few people in the
last 200 years understood human nature and mankind’s fallen state quite like
Dostoevsky. His uncanny abilities to dissect the pathology of a killer or the
spiritual joy of a contented Russian peasant have inspired generations of
writers, thinkers, and even psychologists for a century and a half.
But more than
simply being an insightful novelist on the human condition, Dostoevsky turned
out to be a truly prophetic voice in his predictions of the dangerous and
deadly places where certain ideologies and philosophies popular at the time
would lead his beloved Russia in particular, and the modern Western world in
general.
In the course of a
number of his books – The Devils (aka The Possessed)
and The
Brothers Karamazov, for example – he foretold of the coming
socioeconomic and geopolitical nightmares that awaited 20th century
societies that would adopt progressivism, nihilism, and socialism as their
guiding principles. His words carry with them a deeper weight since Dostoevsky
lived during his youth as a progressive ideologue eventually sentenced first to
death and then, after a mock execution meant to “get his attention,” to four
years of hard labor in Siberia.
He returned a
deeply religious man and, after spending a few years in Europe investigating
the teachings of leading Western intellectuals, a vehement anti-socialist.
In describing the
underlying motivations of the young, radical, rabble-rousing character Peter
Verkhovensky in The Devils, Dostoevsky said:
He’s a kind,
well-meaning boy, and awfully sensitive…But let me tell you, the whole trouble
stems from immaturity and sentimentality! It’s not the practical aspects of
socialism that fascinate him, but its emotional appeal – its idealism –what we
may call its mystical, religious aspect – its romanticism…and on top of that,
he just parrots other people.
Only someone who
has known the “other side” of the psychological lines, commiserating among
those who wish to tear civilizations and their institutions down from within,
can write with such creative specificity.
But again,
Dostoevsky’s strength remains the predictive quality of his novels. He
identified the strategies the Left would use in the 20th century and their
final destinations. Three of these nightmare prophecies stand out: the war on
the family, the replacement of old theistic religions for a new (thoroughly secular)
one, and the extermination of millions of citizens on behalf of “the cause.”
1) Generational Sins: The War on the Family
Before our
philosophy of life develops, before our religious worldview forms, before our
political convictions solidify — there exists the family. Dostoevsky’s novels
and short stories are packed with familial themes because, apart from his later
Christian faith, his experiences as a child and young adult had profound and
lasting consequences — just as they do for all of us.
No big secret
here.
But where
Dostoevsky’s study of the institution of the family and its relation to society
and politics goes from “some fairly obvious observations” to “a wealth of
discerning insights” comes in just how much importance for almost everything he
places at the feet of the family. His respect for this sacred institution only
increased with age as he began to comprehend progressives’ militant disdain for
the family, for marriage, and for any other type of education save the kind
they — the revolutionaries who would one day rule the nation — provided.
Consequently, Dostoevsky’s later books, such as The Adolescent, Brothers,
and Devils, focus on these themes with characters overwhelmed by
their family’s past.
In Devils,
the character Peter Verkhovensky poses as a beguiling and
well-connected socialist dissident. We learn that his father, a former
professor named Stepan Trofimovich, abandoned him as a child to be raised
by intellectuals at various academies and universities. Peter’s odd choice of
his own home province in the Russian countryside for the site of a cultural
coup suddenly makes more sense: he wants to make his dad and those in the
community suffer and feel humiliation. He craves payback for a miserable
childhood. And what better way than to pose as a “man of the people” who is
simply trying to overthrow greedy capitalists and oppressive religious
traditions?
The
reality: Stepan Trofimovich did in fact abandon his son. And the seeds of
skepticism and rebellion against authority that Stepan’s generation had sown
appeared fully realized in their offspring.
The results were
disastrous. Just as they are in any culture where abdication of the primal duty
to take care of your own children is tolerated (or worse still, encouraged).
Because Stepan Stepan Trofimovich disregarded his family, and consequently
his son grew up to want to destroy everyone else’s.
But the attack on
the family, and the exploitation of the difficult or disillusioned childhoods
many young people in 1870s Russia experienced, was not enough. Progressives
knew this, and so did Dostoevsky. For even in the worst of circumstances, in
the most broken of homes, faith still endured in the hearts of many Russians.
Like Alyosha, the saintly youngest brother in Brothers Karamazov, the
spiritual convictions of millions in Mother Russia would not die only through
the undermining of the family. Something bigger had to be done. Someone bigger
had to go.
They needed to
murder God.
2) Militant Atheism: The War on God
Socialism, the
economic and political theory that advocates for the state to control the means
of production and oversee the distribution of resources, was relatively new
back in Fyodor’s day, and the assumption among small groups of intellectuals
from Moscow to Mexico was that it would inevitably become the way all countries
ran their governments, societies, and economies. Dostoevsky not only believed
the sincerity in their beliefs, but that their convictions would win out in
nations around the globe to cause unprecedented suffering before collapsing
under the weight of internal contradictions and weaknesses.
Dostoevsky held
that the inherent weakness of the Utopian visions of socialism was a
rejection of God and the institution of the family. He saw that for the Left,
their politics became their religion. The members of the progressive-Left were
demanding that standards of Judeo-Christian morality be replaced with new (arbitrary)
standards handed down from central councils and planning committees.
Dostoevsky wrote
the following description of the youngest Karamazov brother Alyosha in The
Brothers Karamazov:
The path he chose
was a path going in the opposite direction of many his age, but he chose it
with the same thirst for swift achievement. As soon as he reflected
seriously on it, he was convinced and convicted of the existence of God and of
the immortality of the soul, and at once he instinctively said to himself: “I
want to live for immortality with Him and I will accept no compromise.”
In the same way,
if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have
become an atheist and socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor
question, but it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of
the form taken by atheism today. It is the question of the tower of
Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven
on earth.
Dostoevsky
believed that if even religious nations could commit heinous acts, a secular
state would be capable of unspeakable atrocities.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later
put it: “A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s
why all this has happened.”
3) Genocide: The War on Man
The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis pale in comparison to the horrors committed by the communists in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China’s communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel’s website here, and in his book “Death by Government.”
The numbers
involved stagger the mind. We must shine a spotlight on a truth our modern
education system has failed to teach American students: these were all secular,
socialist nations that began under the auspices of such lofty-sounding goals as
“a workers’ paradise” and “the peoples’ republic.”
Like lambs to the
slaughter, millions went simply because
dutiful bureaucrats and foot soldiers carried out the orders of
philosopher-kings who were ready to sacrifice humanity for the sake of their
“rational” and “progressive” and “scientific” system of governance.
And yet this
nightmare did not begin to play itself out until a few decades into the 20th
century. Some fifty years earlier, a Russian novelist by the name of Fyodor
Mikhailovich Dostoevsky conceived of characters such as the social theorist
“Shigalov” in The Devils who announced to the inner circle of
socialist revolutionaries he belonged to the logical long-term plan for ruling
the people once the czar was toppled:
Dedicating my
energies to the study of the social organisation which is in the future to
replace the present condition of things, I’ve come to the conviction that all
makers of social systems from ancient times up to the present year, 187-, have
been dreamers, tellers of fairy-tales, fools who contradicted themselves, who
understood nothing of natural science and the strange animal called man…
I suggest as a
final solution of the question the division of mankind into two unequal parts.
One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other
nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to
speak, a herd, and, through boundless submission, will by a series
of regenerations attain primeval innocence, something like
the Garden of Eden. They’ll have to work, however. The measures I propose for
depriving nine-tenths of mankind of their freedom and transforming them into a
herd through the education of whole generations are very remarkable, founded on
the facts of nature and highly logical.
To this, the
aforementioned ringleader Peter Verkhovensky responds:
“However much you tinker with the world, you can’t make a good job of it, but by cutting off a hundred million heads and so lightening one’s burden, one can jump over the ditch of transforming society more safely. … It’s a new religion, my good friend, coming to take the place of the old one. That’s why so many fighters come forward, and it’s a big movement…
I ask you which
you prefer: the slow way, which consists in the composition of socialistic
romances and the academic ordering of the destinies of humanity a thousand
years hence, while despotism will swallow the savory morsels which
would almost fly into your mouths of themselves if you’d take a little trouble;
or do you, whatever it may imply, prefer a quicker way which will at last untie
your hands, and will let humanity make its own social organisation in freedom
and in action, not on paper? They shout “cut off a hundred million heads”; that
may be only a metaphor; but why be afraid of it if, with the slow day-dream on
paper, despotism in the course of some hundred years will devour not a hundred
but five hundred million heads?
What’s
one-to-five-hundred million “heads” among friends, right?
Again, keep in
mind Dostoevsky penned these words in 1872. Great evils like tyrannical
monarchies and human slave-trafficking had existed on planet earth since time
began, but this devious mixture of both with a calculated and cavalier attitude
toward human life startled those in the 19th century like Dostoevsky who first
heard the schemes of the original community organizers (and had the good sense
to believe that they’d carry out their plans should they ever gain power).
It’s very
difficult for my generation – the current 18 to 35 demographic – to grasp just
how much suffering and death and oppression took place in the 20th century.
We do not receive a comprehensive version of history in our public schools and
institutions of higher education that might shed critical light on ideologies
many in academia support. And to be sure, we can’t count on Hollywood and the
entertainment industry to pick up any such slack in the culture.
But this matters.
Ideas have consequences. Tens of millions died in the last century because of
evil ideas.
And if an
epileptic, compulsive-gambling, ex-convict in Russia 150 years ago could so
accurately peer into the murky future to warn us, the least we can do is simply
turn around to take in the much clearer view from this side of world history.
“Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Perhaps the best
explanation for the Nostradamus-like talents of Fyodor Dostoevsky can be found
in this telling quote from a personal letter he sent a friend upon embarking on
a career as a writer. Old Fyodor was an astute student of the human condition,
but his motivation did not stem simply from academic purposes or from the fact
that he wanted something, like political power.
Dostoevsky,
believe it or not, actually valued life and wanted to live it more fully. He
sought to realize his own purpose and function, and then to share his findings.
He believed that just because we can’t know everything about our existence and
the ongoing tale of humanity does not mean we cannot know anything. Nearly all
of us say we want to find answers; most prematurely resign
from the hunt.
Fyodor never did.
And as a result, his novels remain as relevant today as they were 150 years
ago.
In
the first half of this essay on the 20th
century sociopolitical nightmares that Dostoevsky predicted in his novels, we
identified three specific areas of the culture that the great Russian writer
correctly foresaw would suffer under the rise of secularism and socialism: the
institution of the family, the private religion of the people, and the value
such a nation puts on human life.
Today we will take
a peek under the hood of three more important areas of society that would
ultimately sit under judgment of the prophetic pronouncements Dostoevsky made
in his impressive body of work:
- Economics of Envy: The
War on Private Property
- Idolizing the
Intellectual: The War on Higher Education
- and Social Engineering:
The War on the Individual
4) Economics of Envy – The War on Private Property
Dostoevsky held a
deep-rooted distrust and disdain for centralized power. He also despised the
decadence exhibited by many among Russia’s elite. He was a man of the people,
not of big government nor big business (which, especially in those days, operated
under the protective umbrella of big government).
But some
misunderstand Dostoevsky’s aversion to “big” as a condemnation of what we know
today as free-market capitalism. The caricatures of wealthy robber barons
wearing ivory-rimmed monocles or the Monopoly Man lighting cigars with
hundred-dollar bills tend to jump to the front of people’s minds any time a
discussion of free-market economics presents itself, whether that be around the
water-cooler at work or in the pages of a 19th century Russian novel.
I’ve had friends
who lean fiscally Left and know my Dostoevsky appreciation ask me what I think
of his anti-capitalistic message. My response is simple: Dostoevsky hated
centralized power and licentious living among the rich, all while
loving concepts such as private property, personal responsibility,
stewardship, and creative innovation. He waxed poetically against socialism,
Marxism, and those who thought they knew best how to handle other people’s
lives. He wrote extensively on how political and economic freedoms were nothing
without the rule of law and a citizenry that strove toward a virtuous society.
To most folks
“capitalism” is merely an abstract concept, just as “socialism” is merely a
label. The issue is values; Dostoevsky hated what we would consider
“progressive” economic and political values. He hated them so much, he
understood their deep flaws so well, that he chose to write about them in his
books, identifying a root motivation that drove so many on the Left in his day:
envy (or covetousness).
Last time, I cited
his novel The
Devils and the characters of Peter Verkhovensky (an
ardent socialist radical) and his hapless father Stepan Trofimovich (a man
who dabbled in progressivism, which greatly influenced his son’s future
radicalism). In an utterly self-serving manner — though insightful — the father
Stepan ponders aloud to a friend why it is his son Peter and his progressive
friends seem to be so obsessed with money:
I’ve noticed that
all these desperate socialists and communists are incredibly stingy,
avaricious, and terribly eager to own things. One might even say that the more
ardent a socialist a man is, the stronger is his need to accumulate goods. Why
is this? Does it stem from the emotional element of their socialism?
As syndicated
radio talk show host Dennis Prager often says, more people died in the 20th
century because of class warfare than because of racism, homophobia, and sexism
combined (and x 1,000,000). The myth perpetrated by every leftist
rabble-rouser from Lenin to Hugo Chavez is that they are “men of the people”
who care nothing for power or wealth, only the betterment of
the proletariat. But what invariably happens is those who began by
chanting “eat the rich” begin to eat (and live) like the rich they ate.
In The
Devils, Peter Verkhovensky delivers eloquent monologues
in front of his acolytes regarding the need to abolish private property and to
redistribute wealth back to the peasants. He then spends a large chunk of the
novel fighting tooth-and-nail with his father over the sale of property being
held in his own name. He wants that money. He wants the finer things in life.
He spends all of his time winning the favor and affections of the wealthy and
influential people in his hometown. On the surface he says it is all a ploy to
bring the system down, but when push comes to shove, Peter is found out to be a
power-hungry, money-loving coward.
Why? The simple
answer: envy. Dostoevsky believed that even those who started out with the
noblest intentions would succumb to the temptations of wealth and power if
their mode of “leveling the playing field” included putting themselves chiefly
in charge of the leveling. The use of force to take from some to give to
others, the abolition of private property, the high-minded refusal to give a
man and his family the chance to own their own plot of earth — these were
wicked means to disingenuous ends in his mind. Dostoevsky foresaw
that the dissolution of private property would spell the end of freedom for any
country that adopted it.
To start an
ideology on a lie — revolutionary Marxism’s falsehood that all would magically
be equal once these new people were in power — was to render it void of
morality and to guarantee havoc if ever given power over the population.
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.
It is a lie to say
that owning property — whatever form this may manifest itself in — is wrong or
immoral. Someone is going to own it, and Dostoevsky quickly identified the
collectivist mindset was one that would lead to great human suffering. It
accelerates envy and greed because it is rooted firmly in both.
5) Idolizing the Intellectual: The War on Higher Education
Dostoevsky was a
brilliant man and had great respect for the cultivation and education of the
human mind. But as he gained more notoriety and traveled Western Europe in
intellectual circles, he took note of the type of people produced by the
Western university. What he found troubled him greatly, and his critique of the
modern, progressive intelligentsia was biting and sharp in his later works.
For example, in The
Brothers Karamazov – what ended up being his final novel — one of
the primary characters is a clear illustration of Dostoevsky’s analysis of what
contemporary “higher education” was teaching (and the impact it would have on
society should the masses follow the intellectual leader). Ivan
Fyodorovich Karamazov is the second son of Fyodor Pavlovich
Karamazov, and the middle brother between Dmitri and Alyosha. He possesses a
keen mind and excels in any academic endeavor he undertakes. Because of Ivan’s
acutely logical mind, one cultivated in institutions of higher learning in the
West, the young man demands a rational explanation for everything that happens
in the universe. There is no room for faith, religion, or God (although he is
stalked by Lucifer in his mind). He even writes a long parable titled “The Grand Inquisitor” in which Christ
returns to earth and is rejected by a cardinal for failing to give mankind what
the institutions of man were able to give them.
Grandiose ideas
fill his head about the relative value of human life, and he comes to justify
his hatred of the institution of the family in academic/philosophical terms
(when really he simply had a bad childhood and resents it). The end result is a
person who believes himself superior to all others and who is willing to
manipulate his own convictions so long as they crush those of the “God, Family,
Country” class of Russians he detests.
Sound familiar to
anyone?
Although he does
not kill Fyodor Karamazov directly, the logical extension and practical
execution of his ideas and ethos do, and this drives him to madness.
Now, of course
Dostoevsky did not believe that all learned men would reject God, inspire
murder, and spend the golden years of their life in insane asylums. But he did
believe that ideas have consequences, and the ideas confronting him among the
highly influential intellectual classes in Europe were, to say the least,
troublesome to his traditional values and patriotic spirit.
I’m going to flesh
out social engineering, one of the most common ideas he constantly heard
perpetuated among the ruling classes, but it must first be re-emphasized
that Dostoevsky was no backwoods anti-intellectual. He didn’t hate all ideas
about society, government, and economics — he simply hated many of the ideas
arrogantly labeled “progressive.” It was the worship of these men, and the
acceptance of bad ideas, he loathed.
As Dr. Thomas
Sowell has put it in his book Intellectuals
and Society:
“Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.”
6) Social Engineering: The War on Individual Liberty
In the
18th and 19th centuries, thinkers such as Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Friedrich Engels began to lay
the intellectual groundwork for socialism’s move from a fringe idea to the most
dominant sociopolitical force of the 20th century. They rejected private
property. They loathed the excesses and exploits of industrialization. They
believed in the supremacy of science and the ability of the enlightened human
mind to coordinate the activities of millions of less-enlightened human beings.
Social
engineering, an irreplaceable plank in the
socialist platform, never works because of the complexities of even the
simplest societies. The socialist committed to science and logic is left
floating in the wind with an idea that doesn’t produce the results their
theories promised.
It is here that
the secular collectivist and socialist, realizing that no matter how hard they
try they can never fully eradicate man’s primal desire for higher truths and
objective standards, begins to invoke language that is soaked in moral,
religious connotations.
Words like
“justice,” “compassion,” and “fairness” are bandied about on the Left by
everyone from Karl Marx to Bill Maher. To compound the confusing, contradictory
positions they take, socialists seek out religious leaders sympathetic to their
anti-capitalist, anti-establishment message.
Dostoevsky’s Notes
from Underground was written, at
least in part, in response to the influential novel What Is To Be Done? by
a Russian critic named Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky was a socialist,
and was heavily influenced by the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and
John Stuart Mill. Like many progressives of his day, Chernyshevsky was certain
that human beings are nothing more than the product of their environment, and
given the relevant environment, they could be directed to act as saints or as
the lowest scoundrels. Thus, what was needed, according to the logic here, is a
revolution which would overthrow the Tsarist system prevalent in Russia, and
supplant it with a socialist system that would improve the people by providing
them with an environment that would create peaceful, productive citizens
Dostoevsky took
issue with the notion that human being were anything less than autonomous
actors. He despised the notion that levers being pulled in some far-off capital
would “fix” anything at all. To get philosophical for a moment, Dostoevsky
rejected the idea of determinism, a consequence of which is that people are not
really responsible for their own actions. Constantly recurring in his works are
themes of individual responsibility, the importance of the irrational (or unexplained)
as opposed to cold reason, and the importance of suffering as a purifying
influence on the soul.
These ideas and
values of a passionate individual who prognosticated the disastrous results of
the 20th century should caution leaders in enough countries seeking to silence
and suppress the individuals comprising their nation’s population. We would
have done well to heed his warnings sooner, but we’d be nothing short of fools
to ignore them now.
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